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Description of LTfLL Project[http://www.ltfll-project.org/]:
The LTfLL (Language Technologies for Lifelong Learning) project will create next-generation support and advice services to enhance individual and collaborative building of competences and knowledge creation in educational and organizational settings. The project makes extensive use of language technologies and cognitive models in the services.
The research in the project is organized in 3 themes, each leading to particular types of services and infrastructures:
In theme 1 services are developed to establish the current position of the learner in a domain. Services will offer semi-automatic analysis and comparison of learner portfolios to the domain knowledge and continuous modelling and measurement of conceptual development.
In theme 2 support and feedback services are developed based on analysis of the interactions of students - using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Social Network Analysis (SNA) – and textual output of students - using Latent Semantic Analysis with contributions from NLP.
In theme 3 a knowledge sharing infrastructure is construed that allows comparison and sharing of private knowledge to give rise to new common knowledge and social learning. Ontologies for formal domain representation are combined with social tagging.

Contribution to VUE:
The IPP-BAS team works on the services in theme 3. The resources processed by our sybsystem are xml files with different format (learning materials, lexicons, OWL ontologies). We have a number of software components that process these resources: ontology reasoner, search engine for an xml documents repository, annotators. We have chosen VUE for a visualization environment for the listed resources. Our goal is to make possible in VUE:
- automatic loading of ontologies as a map, editing of ontologies with some restrictions
- creation of former configuration of the visualization of ontologies, xml documents, personal workspace
- automatic loading of xml documents as a map according to a predefined document layout
- translation of an ontology map via lexicon
- creation and browsing on a personal workspace as a content map in VUE. The nodes of the map will be both: resources nodes (ontologies, xml files,...) and their parent nodes will be holder nodes, nodes that point to a set of resources.

Hello,
not a long time ago, I wrote to VUE developers group and the previous message on that topic described in what directions we aim to contribute to VUE development. Now we are starting developing the needed to us functionality.
The first task we have is:
We have as input XML documents validated with different schema. Our goal is to define (at the beginning outside VUE) a transformation schema ( XSLT) that will transform the input data into a valid VUE map that can afterwards be loaded in VUE. The transformation will define domain nodes, range nodes and relations between them. The XML documents will be transformed to graphs that contain just the relevant for the user data, presented in a map view.
In order to be implemented that functionality we need some additional data concerning the schema of VUE-XML format, the way it is processed and an algorithm for automatic layout of the nodes and arcs that will be generated.
We will be very grateful to you if you can supply us additional information about:
- VUE-XML schema
- Nodes that are processed. Are all nodes processed and which are the ones we should generate with the transformation. That is important because we cannot generate coordinates for example with an XSL.
- automatic layout algorithm. As far as I understood you have been working in that direction. Can you give us some more details about automatic layout?

Best Regards,
Aneliya Tincheva

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 01/26/2009 04:51:38

Hello,
thaks for the answer. In the edu.tufts.vue.layout package I can browse the:
- ListRandomLayout
- RelRandomLayout
I will make experiments with both. Are there new layouts?
I need the schema in order to transform our XML data in the map format. For the moment we don't need to extend it.
Another approach for visulaling XML documents is to make the transformations on them, extract nodes and relations and initialize the
VUE data model. Can you supply us some more details about the VUE internal data model and how it is initialized and modified?
Nevertheless how we will proceed, the understanding of the VUE XML format is essential for us.

Hello,
after updating with the latest version on the svn, I get errors of the sort:
- methods of some class that are called somewhere but are not defined in the class
- classes that do not implement methods of interfaces they implement
Would you please hepl me to deal with these errors?

Sorry to hear you're having trouble getting VUE to compile, I think what you'll see if you look at the build.xml script is that some of the supporting libraries have changed in VUE, and those need to be updated in your Eclipse Build properties.

I can't recall exactly what version of build.xml you had before so the list I'm giving you may not be complete but what I believe has changed are the following libraries:
google-collect-snapshot-20080820.jar
gdata-client-1.0.jar
gdata-core-1.0.jar

Some of the other jars were updated as well so if Eclipse hasn't recognized changes you may need to F5 (Refresh) the lib/ folder.

If this doesn't help please send the exact error or a eclipse screenshot and I can diagnose further.

in a few words I will explain what we have done in VUE. Our basic idea is to load XML documents as maps in VUE, according to a set of visualization and behavioral rules.
For the moment we have defined a schema for basic visualization rules. Up to the moment we have reused the available in the "edu.tufts.vue.dataset" package layouts and now we have been working on adapting them for visualization of maps with many nodes in a better arranged form.
As far as I could see the code you committed contains new layouts and they very interesting to us.
When we have some stable version of our code, we will commit it to the svn and I will send you documentation.